Empowering Kids for Real Community Change in Nicaragua

What if we asked kids to teach us about the problems in their communities?  What if they gave recommendations for solving those problems?  And what if we gave them the tools to carry out change?

An organization in northern Nicaragua has taken this very approach, focusing on the empowerment of children and young people in order to improve their lives.  CESESMA, the Center for Education in Health and Environment, began its work in health education in 1996.  Since then, they’ve widened their focus to include education around themes of gender, identity, and the environment.

Their goals are radical: to empower young people and to foster their activism in their communities.  By empowerment, they mean the ability to know their rights and demand them.

In CESESMA’s consultorias, or consultancies, young people design their own research.  They select problems that affect their community and survey their peers in order to generate more knowledge around those problems.  Then they develop an action plan, and are supported by CESESMA in carrying it out.

In one consultoria, kids aged 10-17 from a rural community asked their peers, “What kind of violence have you experienced?”  With the guidance of adult facilitators, the young consultants came up with recommendations for reducing violence, which they presented at a national conference in Managua.

Harry Shier of CESESMA told me, “when I work with these kids over the months, I see how they change from the first meeting—they have a completely different self-identity.”

CESESMA operates within a critique of asistencialismo, or dependency.  Shier explains, “We want to shift young people to empowerment.  We want to give tools and conditions,” not charity, to the communities they work with.

The international NGO Save the Children contrasts an asistencialisto approach with a rights-based one in this way: in the former, people are objects of charity, while the latter views them as rights’ holders.

Thus CESESMA’s work is grounded in a human rights’ approach, and particularly draws from the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child.

Ratified by 192 nations, the Convention guarantees children and young people civil, cultural, economic, political, and social rights, including the right to an education.  

(And FYI, the US is one of just three countries worldwide which has not ratified the Convention.  Its illustrious company: government-less Somalia and the newly-created Republic of South Sudan.  I’ll write more about the Convention in another post).

The work of the young people in the consultorias is framed by Article 12 of the Convention, which addresses freedom of expression.

 Article 12, Convention on the Rights of the Child

States Parties shall assure to the child who is capable of forming his or her own views the right to express those views freely in all matters affecting the child, the views of the child being given due weight in accordance with the age and maturity of the child.

So, what does it look like when kids come up with solutions to their problems?  And what happens next?  In my next post I’ll write about the latest consultoria.  The topic: sexuality and sex education.

For more information:

The factsheet version:

https://www.unicef.org/crc/index_30228.html

CESESMA’s website:

https://www.cesesma.org/bienvenida_eng.htm

Written by Sara Van Note